Re: Real FPGA design?
FPGA design is far more a language. A lot of knowdge and skills you should learn from books and practice.
As a beginner, you'd better start from schematic in. HDL is a description of your hardware or logic. So be aware of that, you have a design in your mind and then describe it. For a skilled worker, the language could promote his/her efficiency hundreds of times than schematic in. But for a beginner, you'd better know the basic cell first, the flip-flop, the logic gates, memory, IO.
One thing quite important is the timing diagram. Draw timing diagram carefully BEFORE any design. If you could draw the timing diagram, you could design.
After that, you'd better aquire some architecture knowledge, bus, memory managments, pipe-line etc. Design a simple CPU is very good excise.
At the time, system knowledge is of great help in your work. You will know how to connect your FPGA into the system and how to get it debuged.
Of course, be familiar with the FPGA device itself is also important. You should know that the resource in the device. But anyway, FPGA devices are more or less the same. If you are very familiar with it and design, you should estimate the right device which will help your company save time and money.
To summarize, before you know all the above HDL is the least important thing for design. After you are familiar with all of these topics, HDL is the most important since it will help you to design what you want.